Notes toward a definition of culture

What is culture? What is our cultural ethos as a people?

Kwame Anthony Appiah, Ghanaian-American philosopher and author of “The Ethicist” column at The New York Times, recently won the Kluge Prize, the Nobel of the social sciences. Previous awardees include Jurgen Habermas (the political theorist) and Paul Ricoeur, whom I intend to read.

Until Appiah received the prize, I am not sure I was aware of him, which is a mystery, because, from what I have seen, he is an incredibly brilliant man. I am in a sort of “dread” when I think about people like that. I am going to get to his book, In My Father’s House, once I do what they call “signing out” in September. (The excitement I feel about graduating comes down to the fact that, after school, I can wake up every day and read what I like for ten, fifteen hours. I am excited to get real education post-university.) To sample the man, though—I mean, $500k is not small money—I tested one, two articles. I read one of his columns for the NYT, and disagreed strongly with his position.

One of the pieces linked on the Kluge site is titled “There is no such thing as western civilization.” It was the last of the Reith Lectures he gave in 2016, the version I read was edited for The Guardian. The argument of the essay is lopsided. It is obvious that he found it difficult to make the point: the inferences he drew from the data he laid out were, to me, quite faulty. He sounds, in the essay, like the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who also makes outrageous statements, though Appiah has a gentile temperament. If Žižek is dangerous (Adam Kirsch called him “The Deadly Jester”), Appiah is more careful. What I think unifies the two thinkers is how they draw on pop culture. “You will find hip-hop in the streets of Tokyo,” Appiah writes. “The same is true in cuisine: Britons once swapped their fish and chips for chicken tikka masala, now, I gather, they’re all having a cheeky Nando’s.”

I am writing this piece not to bash the man. Also, the title I chose is silly, I am not here to “define” culture. There is no reason why I should define it when people like Appiah have done extensive work on it. But it would be good to say one or two things on the matter.

What is culture? People say they work in the cultural space; they talk about other people’s appropriation of their culture; they take pride in their culture. When we talk of a “cultural space” (take a platform like The Republic, which is doing good work: check out this brilliant interview with the brilliant Chimezie Chika, and Open Country Mag as examples of what I am getting at) and we talk of Yoruba culture, are we talking of the same thing?

Appiah himself talks about “conceptual mistakes.” As I see it, there are two (or maybe three) levels or types of culture—conceptually speaking, that is. Arnold’s definition of culture and Edward Burnett Tylor’s are not antagonistic forms of culture, as Appiah thinks of it; they are variations on a theme. Matthew Arnold’s idea of culture as “the best that has been thought and said in the world” is a definition of culture’s aim: the Ideal plane of culture. Culture as Burnett understood it is the rudimentary form of the theme. When you talk about The Republic as a “cultural space”—I am speaking in approximate terms—you are employing the Arnoldian reading of the theme. When you speak of language (Igbo language, Yoruba, Ikale), what you are using is Tylor’s.

But I suggested that there is a third strand or way of reading this thing. Within every Tylor-kind of culture, there is the Ideal that is akin to the Arnoldian concept. Even though you know a Yoruba by how they dress and speak and by their cuisine, there is also the value quotient among Yoruba people, and that value element usually transcends the rudimentary form of culture—it reaches for what is divine in humanity. Or, to stay with the clay, for what is Human. As Terence said, “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.” (I like how William Logan says this and I want to cry because I cannot say it that clean.) “I am human,” says Terence—“a former slave from Roman Africa, a Latin interpreter of Greek comedies, a writer from classical Europe who called himself Terence the African,” a man of Arnoldian culture!—“nothing human can be alien to me.”

Appiah quotes that at the end of his lecture, William Logan quoted it in a review of Frederick Seidel’s poetry: to think of the two uses of the same quote is to understand how it can be used in any context and it means something different. In the review of Seidel’s work, Logan was commenting on what you will consider “gross” in human character, which Seidel’s poetry deals with, i.e., a teasing kind of lust (“Every woman who wants to be spanked should be / Spanked for wanting to be.”). Appiah, on the other hand, uses the same quote to a kind of dignified end, although my guess is that he would not agree with me that there is a certain lack of dignity in wanting to be spanked.

I am not a fan of “everything human.” Cheswayo Mphanza’s phrase, again, comes to mind: “I don’t know what I’m becoming / that breaks what’s left of what’s human in me.” He was using Tim Seibles, and I think what both Seibles and Mphanza mean by “what is human” is that which is given to grace in humanity, not the deep dark corner of our being, which is as real as, even realer than, that which is given to minor grace. I say the deep dark corner is realer because I believe in the fall and I know that even when a man does good, it is tainted by that darkness he has his hands soaked in.

To define that which is human, this is what I am trying to do. “Nothing human is alien to me,” as I have mentioned, can be used to justify anything. Is pedophilia the offense of goats or humans? Is that, too, not alien to us? Of course, we live in a culture that answers “No” to that question. We have taken empathy as a god. We have substituted being kind for being reasonable, because we have forgotten that the two can co-exist. I can love you and not love the rot in you. To love me, in fact, is to desire that the fine point of my character becomes more radiant and the gross part (which we all have) grows dimmer and dimmer until it dies out.

Terence’s statement has survived because it was retained by a culture. It has carried down the ages because of the dignity of Latin, the language of the elite, scholars and philosophers wrote majorly in Latin until well into the 1700s. Would it have survived with the name of Terence if Terence had never been in the Roman empire, if Terence was a sage in the Oyo empire of the 17th century? Maybe it would have, but not with Terence’s name—it would have survived as a proverb, worn and battered before it reached us, but still relevant.

It was preserved by a culture—a culture that cherishes the apogee and that retains all that is high in that which is human, because it points to something other than man himself: it points to God. If there is one thing that makes Western Civilization what it is (and Appiah pushes this aside like a napkin), it is this: that a people keep on pursuing the highest point of “what is human” because they have a context for believing it is there to tap from. (A radical thing happened, though. The context became so woven into their system that they forgot it was there, anyone can work using the context without acknowledging it, which has led many of those in the West to think the context can be done without.) Perhaps a civilization is not Bach or the great architecture or The Principia, perhaps that is not what culture is, culture is that system of thought that makes Bach’s fugues possible, that made Brahe wait up nights on nights studying the moon and calculating.

That system of thought, that quest for the divine-in-the-human is a consequence of Christianity. The fundamental idea—seems trite—that man exists in the image of God. The Yoruba have a sense of high culture in the “Omoluabi”—the ideal individual, but we do not have the Ideal individual that is both God and Man. The idea that “God appeared in the flesh and dwelt among us,” and it is not an “idea” but a historical fact, cannot not change the world. We had rituals but not the figure that fuses us with God. That figure (in the person of Christ) was the revolution.

Appiah says, for instance, and people say it often, that in the 9th or tenth centuries, Baghdad was the leading capital in the world in terms of scholarship. The question Bernard Lewis asked in his essay on the subject is the essay’s title, “What Went Wrong?” Not only did England and most of Europe come to overtake the Islamic world, they redefined the world. There is a system of thought alive in the Western tradition (and “tradition,” as Eliot has it, is not ash but fire), that “system of thought” is what you call a worldview. It is what defines every rudimentary sort of culture and it is what determines their place on the Arnoldian plane. The Islamic world did not have it. It could thrive by force of arms for centuries and even by learning, but eventually regress set in.

“What does it say over the door of Heaven
But homo fecit?” — Richard Wilbur

What is our cultural ethos as a people? Why is Africa were it is? Culture, the Arnoldian reading. (I recommend “Race, Culture, and Equality” by Thomas Sowell.) And here I agree with Appiah: “The values European humanists like to espouse belong just as easily to an African or an Asian who takes them up with enthusiasm as to a European.” Bach belongs just as much to me as Soyinka does, so does T. S. Eliot. In fact, there are several African poets, but my favorite living poet was born in Texas: He is not African. What connects us is that love for, that acceptance of, Arnold’s reading of culture. Still, I must acknowledge that Arnold and Eliot are the gifts of the West to the world. Once I have acknowledged that, I can “take them up.” The goal, our goal, should not be to attack what is theirs in other to claim it as ours, too. Part of the ethos of the Arnoldian “type” of culture, a profound Western gift, is that what its own have earned, it sees as belonging to the human fund. What are you contributing to it?

Think of the last stanza of Richard Wilbur’s “For the New Railway Station in Rome”:

“What is our praise or pride
But to imagine excellence, and try to make it?
What does it say over the door of Heaven
But homo fecit?” 🔷